This past week my class played ultimate werewolf, which I have played before and really enjoyed. It’s a large hidden role game similar to that of Mafia for those who have played Mafia. There are two teams, with specific roles on each team. The werewolves goal is to kill everyone in the town until they have the same number of werewolves as townspeople. The townspeople’s goal is to use all of their roles and vote a person to kill every night, in hopes of getting rid of the werewolves. The game has 2 phases, night and day. During the night everyone “goes to sleep” and the narrator wakes the werewolves up, and they choose someone to kill by pointing. They go back to sleep and then in succession all of the special roles get to wake up and preform their actions. For example the seer can ask the moderator if someone in the group is a werewolf. There is the bodyguard, who every night gets to pick someone to save from death. So if a werewolf picks someone and the bodyguard later chooses to save them, the person is alive and no one dies that round. One of the roles which I dislike the most is the ghost. The ghost (once he is killed) may give the group a 1 letter clue each round. So essentially the ghost should get themselves killed as soon as possible to help the team. I dislike this role, because it takes over the game, and people end up ignoring the other roles and mechanics that this game has. The ghost in the case of our game, end up getting all 4 werewolves dead in 6 turns total (including killing himself). The only reason the werewolves weren’t killed all in a row is because I was somehow able to convince the group that they should kill someone other than myself. There are many more roles within the game, but they can be changed. In this game, each role has a positive or negative value, and the moderator must make sure that the cards are even so that one side doesn’t have an advantage.
The most challenging part of this game for me is finding the balance between talking and not talking. Someone who talks a lot draws attention to themselves and is a prime suspect to kill. Someone who is too silent is also someone to be worried about. For this specific game, as a werewolf it was very difficult to argue your case when the ghost was using their power. My name is Nick, and when the ghost put an N on the board, everyone figured it was me because I was the only one with a name starting with N. Luckily someone had an N on their shoes and I convinced everyone that it was him they should kill. They did, but immediately the next round they killed me because the 2nd hint was an I. It was challenging for me, because I believe people rely too much on the mechanism of the ghost and don’t work with the other roles to determine who the bad people are.
The biggest leadership characteristic that I saw in this game was that of convincing people to believe you. One of the players who was not a werewolf immediately talked a lot and was basically facilitating the game discussion and leading people to conclusions that they otherwise might not have come to. This ability is very powerful, because as a werewolf I was able to convince everyone to vote to kill an innocent person, and while it only worked for 1 turn, it worked. The ability of a leader to gain followers and have them trust you as a leader is very important. Gaining that loyalty of a group is something that I try to do anytime I’m a leader. I do this because I know that as a leader I’ll make mistakes, but if people are loyal to you, they’ll understand your mistake hopefully and bounce right back with you.
I think I’d like to play this game without the role of Ghost, because I believe it alters the game too much. Beyond that I’d like to play with my friend Derek. He’s really good at reading people and putting a lot of random pieces together to form a complete picture. This characteristic makes him really good at hidden role games.